Google Search Console
Google's free console for site owners, reporting how a site performs in search before the click and how healthy its crawling and indexing are.
Analogy Mental model
If analytics is the camera inside the shop, Search Console is the camera covering the whole street outside plus the post box where regulators send official notices. It shows what passers-by searched before they saw your sign, whether they came in, and what inspectors found when they visited.
In practice What you actually do
Three habits cover most of the value: read the performance report over a rolling twenty-eight days for clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position; use URL inspection to request crawling of new pages; and work through the pages report whenever index coverage drops.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
The interface only retains sixteen months of data. On a large site, export it to a warehouse through the API on a schedule, or you will lose the ability to compare this year against last year exactly when you need it most.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →